Steven Sinofsky, Microsoft’s former President of the Windows Division, published an interesting review of the MacBook Neo, where he also explores what went wrong with Microsoft’s own early push toward lightweight ARM-based PCs. Here’s what he said.
The MacBook Neo might be Microsoft’s road not taken
If you’re not familiar with Steven Sinofsky, he worked at Microsoft from 1989, when he joined as a software design engineer, and left in 2012, having led multiple teams and divisions linked to Office and Windows.
After he left Microsoft, Sinofsky started a blog called Learning by Shipping, where he publishes “essays, thoughts, and missives, on management, strategy, competition, and other aspects of the technology industry.”
His posts often offer a refreshingly candid look at his time at Microsoft, as well as on the industry as a whole, and don’t shy away from insightful criticism (and self-criticism) when appropriate.
In his new post, titled “Mac Neo and my afternoon of reflection and melancholy,” Sinofsky echoes the nearly unanimous praise that the MacBook Neo has received this week from other reviews (including ours).
However, he also looks at the success of what Apple managed to pull off with its new low-cost laptop from the vantage point of someone who attempted to pull a similar play in the past, albeit with a very different outcome:
“So when I thought about Windows 8 over the past dozen years, I quite often settled on being early AND wrong or too much too soon when I didn’t want to feel that bad.
But today I’m using Neo and thinking about Windows 8 and Surface, and I have to admit I’m struggling with that conclusion. We had all the pieces and all the pieces worked then. […] The world as we lived it was quite capable of running the device. And it cost $599 with keyboard/32GB, $699 for 64GB. […]
Where we were wrong was in moving the ecosystem to a new app model fast enough that was safer, more reliable, more power efficient. A lot of people rebelled about this. […] From the day we announced ARM we sought to separate the x86 Windows world and be new. I knew that any baby-step in the Microsoft world was in practice a lifetime commitment. You can see this in how ARM is treated today, as a forever alternative to x86. We viewed it then and I still view it that way as the replacement. There’s no revisionist history here. It was our strategy.”
Sinofsky contrasts that with Apple’s decades-long effort to move developers toward new APIs and frameworks, something he argues made the transition to ARM-based Macs far easier (and the MacBook Neo possible) than Microsoft’s attempt, which was constrained by the company’s commitment to near-perpetual backward compatibility.
While this is just the core of Sinofsky’s thesis on why Microsoft’s attempt to build something similar to the MacBook Neo years ago didn’t pan out, the full post is packed with interesting insights, and his usual no-PR-spin reflections on past projects, warts and all.
As for the actual review of the MacBook Neo, he does offer an interesting way to think about the whole discussion surrounding the trade-offs that Apple had to make to deliver this $599 laptop, and who it is really for:
Neo doesn’t have to get better. It just has to stay excellent. If you need or just want better, there’s two more levels of laptops and two levels of desktops. Plus iPads. The Neo in 5 years will be more powerful than most of those and probably still cost $699. Moore’s law is undefeated.
To check out his full post, follow this link.
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